He believed all the news he heard and had faith in none.
He was on the alert constantly for every signal, shrewdly sensitive to relationships and situations that did not exist. He was someone in the know who was always striving pathetically to find out what was going on.
He was a blustering, intrepid bully who brooded inconsolably over the terrible ineradicable impressions he knew he kept making on people of prominence who were scarcely aware that he was even alive.
Everybody was persecuting him. Colonel Cathcart lived by his wits in an unstable, arithmetical world of black eyes and feathers in his cap, of overwhelming imaginary triumphs and catastrophic imaginary defeats.
He oscillated hourly between anguish and exhilaration, multiplying fantastically the grandeur of his victories and exaggerating tragically the seriousness of his defeats.
Nobody ever caught him napping.
If word reached him that General Dreedle or General Peckem had been seen smiling, frowning, or doing neither, he could not make himself rest until he had found an acceptable interpretation and grumbled mulishly until Colonel Korn persuaded him to relax and take things easy.
Lieutenant Colonel Korn was a loyal, indispensable ally who got on Colonel Cathcart’s nerves.
Colonel Cathcart pledged eternal gratitude to Colonel Korn for the ingenious moves he devised and was furious with him afterward when he realized they might not work.
Colonel Cathcart was greatly indebted to Colonel Korn and did not like him at all.
The two were very close.
Colonel Cathcart was jealous of Colonel Korn’s intelligence and had to remind himself often that Colonel Korn was still only a lieutenant colonel, even though he was almost ten years older than Colonel Cathcart, and that Colonel Korn had obtained his education at a state university.
Colonel Cathcart bewailed the miserable fate that had given him for an invaluable assistant someone as common as Colonel Korn.
It was degrading to have to depend so thoroughly on a person who had been educated at a state university.
If someone did have to become indispensable to him, Colonel Cathcart lamented, it could just as easily have been someone wealthy and well groomed, someone from a better family who was more mature than Colonel Korn and who did not treat Colonel Cathcart’s desire to become a general as frivolously as Colonel Cathcart secretly suspected Colonel Korn secretly did.
Colonel Cathcart wanted to be a general so desperately he was willing to try anything, even religion, and he summoned the chaplain to his office late one morning the week after he had raised the number of missions to sixty and pointed abruptly down toward his desk to his copy of The Saturday Evening Post.
The colonel wore his khaki shirt collar wide open, exposing a shadow of tough black bristles of beard on his egg-white neck, and had a spongy hanging underlip.
He was a person who never tanned, and he kept out of the sun as much as possible to avoid burning.
The colonel was more than a head taller than the chaplain and over twice as broad, and his swollen, overbearing authority made the chaplain feel frail and sickly by contrast.
‘Take a look, Chaplain,’ Colonel Cathcart directed, screwing a cigarette into his holder and seating himself affluently in the swivel chair behind his desk.
‘Let me know what you think.’
The chaplain looked down at the open magazine compliantly and saw an editorial spread dealing with an American bomber group in England whose chaplain said prayers in the briefing room before each mission.
The chaplain almost wept with happiness when he realized the colonel was not going to holler at him.
The two had hardly spoken since the tumultuous evening Colonel Cathcart had thrown him out of the officers’ club at General Dreedle’s bidding after Chief White Halfoat had punched Colonel Moodus in the nose.
The chaplain’s initial fear had been that the colonel intended reprimanding him for having gone back into the officers’ club without permission the evening before.
He had gone there with Yossarian and Dunbar after the two had come unexpectedly to his tent in the clearing in the woods to ask him to join them.
Intimidated as he was by Colonel Cathcart, he nevertheless found it easier to brave his displeasure than to decline the thoughtful invitation of his two new friends, whom he had met on one of his hospital visits just a few weeks before and who had worked so effectively to insulate him against the myriad social vicissitudes involved in his official duty to live on closest terms of familiarity with more than nine hundred unfamiliar officers and enlisted men who thought him an odd duck.
The chaplain glued his eyes to the pages of the magazine.
He studied each photograph twice and read the captions intently as he organized his response to the colonel’s question into a grammatically complete sentence that he rehearsed and reorganized in his mind a considerable number of times before he was able finally to muster the courage to reply.
‘I think that saying prayers before each mission is a very moral and highly laudatory procedure, sir,’ he offered timidly, and waited.
‘Yeah,’ said the colonel.
‘But I want to know if you think they’ll work here.’
‘Yes, sir,’ answered the chaplain after a few moments.
‘I should think they would.’
‘Then I’d like to give it a try.’
The colonel’s ponderous, farinaceous cheeks were tinted suddenly with glowing patches of enthusiasm.
He rose to his feet and began walking around excitedly.
‘Look how much good they’ve done for these people in England.
Here’s a picture of a colonel in The Saturday Evening Post whose chaplain conducts prayers before each mission.
If the prayers work for him, they should work for us.
Maybe if we say prayers, they’ll put my picture in The Saturday Evening Post.’
The colonel sat down again and smiled distantly in lavish contemplation.
The chaplain had no hint of what he was expected to say next. With a pensive expression on his oblong, rather pale face, he allowed his gaze to settle on several of the high bushels filled with red plum tomatoes that stood in rows against each of the walls.
He pretended to concentrate on a reply. After a while he realized that he was staring at rows and rows of bushels of red plum tomatoes and grew so intrigued by the question of what bushels brimming with red plum tomatoes were doing in a group commander’s office that he forgot completely about the discussion of prayer meetings until Colonel Cathcart, in a genial digression, inquired:
‘Would you like to buy some, Chaplain? They come right off the farm Colonel Korn and I have up in the hills.
I can let you have a bushel wholesale.’
‘Oh, no, sir.
I don’t think so.’
‘That’s quite all right,’ the colonel assured him liberally.
‘You don’t have to.